Bearing failure or an excessive rate of wear has been a continuing problem in conveyors where the roller shafts are seated in holes formed through the conveyor frame. This arrangement is also noisy especially when looseness due to wear or bearing failure occurs. The use of conventional bearing products such as sleeve, roller or ball bearings to reduce this problem are too expensive to be practical.
Another problem has been that of mounting the conveyor rollers at an oblique angle to the side frame members. The result is a conveyor having its rollers skewed sometimes at a substantial angle to the side frame members. This arrangement is used for various purposes in the conveyor art such as to cause all the articles to shift to one side of the conveyor.
Supporting skewed rollers has been a continuing problem. In some cases, the side frame members have been drilled or bored to provide openings aligned with the shafts of the rollers rather than with the plane of the side frame members. This is both expensive and unsatisfactory. The use of bearings having mounting flanges turned at an oblique angle is prohibitively expensive. Further, all of the various devices used for this purpose have been static, that is, non-adjustable for various angles. Therefore, no adjustment for variations in the angular relationship between the axis of the rollers and the frame members has been possible. These problems have made skewed roller conveyors expensive and have discouraged their use.